Namestorm 10 – Baby Names for Computer Lovers

Last week’s namestorm featured Internet-related names specifically, so this week’s focuses on names inspired by computers and computing generally:

Charles
English inventor and mechanical engineer Charles Babbage first described the analytical engine in 1837.

Ada (or Augusta)
English writer Ada Lovelace (born Augusta Ada Byron) wrote what is widely considered to be the first computer algorithm in 1842-1843.

Herman
German-American statistician Herman Hollerith invented the tabulating machine in the late 1880s. His Tabulating Machine Company, founded in 1896, later became IBM.

Alan
English mathematician and computer scientist Alan Turing first described the Turing machine in his influential paper, “On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem,” published in 1937.

Betty, Frances, Kathleen, Marlyn and Ruth
American computer programmers Frances Bilas, Betty Jennings, Ruth Lichterman, Kathleen McNulty, Frances Snyder and Marlyn Wescoff were the six original programmers of the ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator And Computer), the first general-purpose electronic digital computer, in the mid-1940s.

Maurice
British computer scientist Maurice Wilkes designed the constructed the EDSAC (Electronic Delay Storage Automatic Calculator), the first computer with an internally stored program, in the late 1940s.

Leo
The LEO I (Lyons Electronic Office I), the first computer used for commercial business applications, ran its first business application in 1951.

John
American computer scientist John Backus invented FORTRAN, the first widely used high-level programming language, in the mid-1950s.

Jack and Robert
American electrical engineer Jack Kilby and American scientist Robert Noyce were independent co-inventors of the microchip in the late 1950s.

Dennis
American computer scientist Dennis Ritchie developed the C programming language in 1972.

Osborne
The 24-pound Osborne 1, the first commercially successful portable computer, was released in 1981.

Richard
American computer programmer Richard Stallman started the GNU Project in 1983.

8 thoughts on “Namestorm 10 – Baby Names for Computer Lovers”

Or if you’re seriously into obscure programming languages, Philip, after my favourite lecturer, and part-inventor of the language called Haskell, Philip Wadler. He’s so awesome, he even has his own Wikipedia page. [Other people who helped invent Haskell were Simon Peyton Jones and Paul Hudak, but they can’t be as awesome as Phil]